the note of discrimination, just
as his drama is to become, under stress, the drama of discrimination.
It would have been his blest imagination, we have seen, that had
already helped him to discriminate; the element that was for so much of
the pleasure of my cutting thick, as I have intimated, into his
intellectual, into his moral substance. Yet here it was, at the same
time, just here, that a shade for a moment fell across the scene.

There was the dreadful little old tradition, one of the platitudes of
the human comedy, that people's moral scheme DOES break down in Paris;
that nothing is more frequently observed; that hundreds of thousands of
more or less hypocritical or more or less cynical persons annually
visit the place for the sake of the probable catastrophe, and that I
came late in the day to work myself up about it. There was in fine the
TRIVIAL association, one of the vulgarest in the world; but which give
me pause no longer, I think, simply because its vulgarity is so
advertised. The revolution performed by Strether under the influence
of the most interesting of great cities was to have nothing to do with
any betise of the imputably "tempted" state; he was to be thrown
forward, rather, thrown quite with violence, upon his lifelong trick of
intense reflexion: which friendly test indeed was to bring him out,
through winding passages, through alternations of darkness and light,
very much IN Paris, but with the surrounding scene itself a minor
matter, a mere symbol for more things than had been dreamt of in the
philosophy of Woollett. Another surrounding scene would have done as
well for our show could it have represented a place in which Strether's
errand was likely to lie and his crisis to await him. The LIKELY place
had the great merit of sparing me preparations; there would have been
too many involved--not at all impossibilities, only rather worrying and
delaying difficulties--in positing elsewhere Chad Newsome's interesting
relation, his so interesting complexity of relations. Strether's
appointed stage, in fine, could be but Chad's most luckily selected
one. The young man had gone in, as they say, for circumjacent charm;
and where he would have found it, by the turn of his mind, most
"authentic," was where his earnest friend's analysis would most find
HIM; as well as where, for that matter, the former's whole analytic
faculty would be led such a wonderful dance.

"The Ambassadors" had been, all conve